The Impact of Disruptive Technologies in Finance and Accounting: A Systematic Literature Review

Dissertation presented as the partial requirement for obtaining a Master's degree in Information Management, specialization in Knowledge Management and Business IntelligenceThe digital transition era, marked by a strong evolution of Information Technologies, and its massive expansion towards all products, services, and sectors, has changed all known methods for carrying out and conducting all sorts of professional practices. Within the scope of accounting activities and transactions related to accounting, various tasks have started to be automatized with the help of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. Hence, no longer existing the need of spending time on some of the repetitive day-to-day tasks, professionals in these areas will have more time and freedom to perform predictive business analysis, to collect and report financial data, which will most likely become vital to assist decision-making and possible attraction of new investments. As such, there is a clear link between accounting and the emergence of disruptive technologies, which indicates an interesting research area for accounting information systems researchers. What is the impact of disruptive technologies in accounting practices? What is the role played by accountants to work alongside their digital colleagues? What are the skills that accountants may have to be future proof in an ever-changing digital environment? This dissertation aims to answer these questions by following a qualitative and exploratory approach, through a systematic literature review. The analysis reveals that the impact of disruptive technologies in finance and accounting can be summarized in four main domains, Strategic Management, Technology Innovation, Business Acumen and Operations and Accounting Provision. We review the content of recent academic literature regarding the relationship between disruptive technologies and accounting and highlight research gaps and opportunities for future research

The Digitalisation of African Agriculture Report 2018-2019

An inclusive, digitally-enabled agricultural transformation could help achieve meaningful livelihood improvements for Africa’s smallholder farmers and pastoralists. It could drive greater engagement in agriculture from women and youth and create employment opportunities along the value chain. At CTA we staked a claim on this power of digitalisation to more systematically transform agriculture early on. Digitalisation, focusing on not individual ICTs but the application of these technologies to entire value chains, is a theme that cuts across all of our work. In youth entrepreneurship, we are fostering a new breed of young ICT ‘agripreneurs’. In climate-smart agriculture multiple projects provide information that can help towards building resilience for smallholder farmers. And in women empowerment we are supporting digital platforms to drive greater inclusion for women entrepreneurs in agricultural value chains

Managing the Innovation Process: Infusing Data Analytics into the Undergraduate Business Curriculum (Lessons Learned and Next Steps)

The designing of a new, potentially disruptive, curricular program, is not without challenges; however, it can be rewarding for students, faculty, and employers and serve as a template for other academics to follow. To be effective, the new data analytics program should be driven by business input and academic leadership that incorporates innovation theory and practice concepts. Similar to many innovative projects, our journey began with a business problem, i.e., the explosion of data from a plethora of sources, the realization that data transformed into information and intelligence can generate business value, and the recognition that there are currently too few graduates with the necessary skillset to make this happen in the foreseeable future. The approach developed here may provide other universities with a path toward an information systems curriculum that is more in tune with the emerging big data world

Strategic business management : from planning to performance

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The future of internal auditing: how technology is shaping the profession

openThis thesis explores the integration of technology into internal auditing methods to enhance effectiveness and efficiency. The first chapter provides an overview of internal auditing, including its origins, objectives, and theoretical frameworks. Emphasis is placed on maintaining independence, corporate governance, and risk management. The second chapter focuses on planning and daily operations, detailing the steps involved in the audit process and generating reports for improvement. The core of the thesis lies in the third chapter, which highlights the impact of technology, such as Data Analytics, Automation, Process Mining, and Artificial Intelligence. These technologies aim to simplify tasks and enable continuous auditing and monitoring. A vertical passage will be made in the fourth chapter with reference to current regulations in technological issues

Toward a new Framework of Strategic Alignment of Big Data projects: literature review

The notion of strategic alignment is a permanent issue for enterprises, that consists of redesigning a new architecture in order to reach a perfect harmony between the business architecture and the information technology architecture. The strategic alignment is therefore an old issue, that was first cited by Henderson and Venkatraman, in the 70’s, many contributions came along since then by the scientific community. With the emergence of big Data, many scientists focused on how to reach the strategic alignment, based on the new technologies provided by big Data, thus in our contribution, we started to define three main categories that can be used. Those categories can be summarized as reaching strategic alignment either through the big data ecosystem, or through big data analytics capability and finally through the big data transformation. We focused more on the last one, and we managed to propose five bricks that a company can use in order to reach the perfect harmony by doing some efforts on their strategy and business model, on their culture and organization, on their strategy of marketing based on the client experience, and also on their technology choices and their IT infrastructure and finally through the treatment of the data gathered and the establishment of measures.

Do Enterprise Systems Necessarily Lead to Innovation? Identifying the Missing Links with A Moderated Mediation Model

Background: Despite widely implemented, enterprise systems remain an unsettled role in organizational innovation. This study purposes to address the effects of enterprise systems (ES) on firm innovation by adopting resource-based theory and capability building theory to focus on ES-enabled competence, rather than ES investment or implementation. ES-enabled competence is proposed to mediate the effect of ES integration on innovation performance. We further propose that continuous improvement moderates (1) the relationship between ES integration and ES-enabled competence, and (2) the relationship between ES-enabled competence and innovation performance. By examining these effects, we aim to discover how ES enables innovation at operational and strategic levels separately. Method: A survey method is conducted to explore the relationship between enterprise systems (ES) and innovation. Data are collected from manufacturing companies in 10 countries of three regions, i.e., Europe, Asia-Pacific, and the USA, and analyzed by using structural equation modeling technique. Results: We confirm the roles of enterprise systems as a resource and a capability and the effects of these roles on innovation—including the operational outcome, new product development performance, and the strategic one, innovation uniqueness. We demonstrate that continuous improvement moderates the mediation paths, namely “ES integration – ES-enabled competence – innovation performance”. The moderated mediation effect exists among continuous improvement, ES integration, ES-enabled competence, and innovation uniqueness. Conclusion: This study contributes to the ES and innovation research by uncovering the micro-foundation underlying ES-enabled innovation from a capability-based framework and elaborating the moderating role of continuous improvement in enhancing innovation

Building Entrepreneurial Resilience during Crisis using Generative AI: An empirical study on SMEs

Recently, Gen AI has garnered significant attention across various sectors of society, particularly capturing the interest of small business due to its capacity to allow them to reassess their business models with minimal investment. To understand how small and medium-sized firms have utilised Gen AI-based tools to cope with the market's high level of turbulence caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, geopolitical crises, and economic slowdown, researchers have conducted an empirical study. Although Gen AI is receiving more attention, there remains a dearth of empirical studies that investigate how it influences the entrepreneurial orientation of firms and their ability to cultivate entrepreneurial resilience amidst market turbulence. Most of the literature offers anecdotal evidence. To address this research gap, the authors have grounded their theoretical model and research hypotheses in the contingent view of dynamic capability. They tested the research hypotheses using cross-sectional data from a pre-tested survey instrument, which yielded 87 useable responses from small and medium enterprises in France. The authors used variance-based structural equation modelling with the commercial WarpPLS 7.0 software to test the theoretical model. The study's findings suggest that Gen AI and EO have a significant influence on building entrepreneurial resilience as higher-order and lower-order dynamic capabilities. However, market turbulence has a negative moderating effect on the path that joins entrepreneurial orientation and entrepreneurial resilience. The results suggest that the assumption that high market turbulence will have positive effects on dynamic capabilities and competitive advantage is not always true, and the linear assumption does not hold, which is consistent with some scholars' assumptions. The study's results offer significant contributions to the contingent view of dynamic capabilities and open new research avenues that require further investigation into the non-linear relationship of market turbulence

Strategic enterprise management systems : tools for the 21st century

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Management control systems : a case study on a portuguese law firm

The present study was carried out as part of the curricular internship in the management control department in a law firm in Portugal, between September 2021 and February 2022. This study aims to analyse which management control tools are most used in the legal practice in Portugal. The legal industry in Portugal is very institutionalised and has undergone little external change, limiting the space for innovation. However, this panorama has experienced some changes (S. S. Samuelson, 1989). Through a qualitative case study of the legal industry in Portugal, this paper shows how management control systems have been adapted, through digital tools and artificial intelligence, putting the dominant logic under threat. Through a questionnaire conducted by the ROOX company that characterises the legal industry in Portugal, it is possible to conclude that law firms do not use the potential of Business Process Management and Business Intelligence in their management performance, although there is an awareness for their use. This work contrasts the conservative vision of law firms with innovative practices that the firm under study has been adapting. Consequently, this work contributes to our understanding of digital innovation and digital transformation within highly institutional industries, as well as the interaction between the enterprise resource planning system and the management control system leading to an improvement in firm performance.O presente estudo foi realizado no âmbito do estágio curricular no departamento de controlo de gestão numa empresa de advocacia em Portugal, entre setembro de 2021 a fevereiro de 2022. Este estudo visa analisar quais as ferramentas de controlo de gestão mais utilizadas na advocacia em Portugal. A indústria jurídica em Portugal está muito institucionalizada e tem sofrido poucas mudanças externas, limitando o espaço para inovação. Contudo, este panorama tem experienciado algumas alterações (S. S. Samuelson, 1989). Através de um estudo de caso qualitativo da indústria jurídica em Portugal, este trabalho apresenta como os sistemas de controlo de gestão têm sido adaptados, através de ferramentas digitais e de inteligência artificial, colocando a lógica dominante sob ameaça. Através de um questionário realizado pela empresa ROOX que caracteriza a indústria jurídica em Portugal, é possível concluir que os escritórios não usam o potencial do BPM e BI na sua performance de gestão, embora haja uma consciencialização para a sua utilização. Este trabalho contrasta a visão conservadora dos escritórios de advocacia com práticas inovadoras que a empresa em estudo tem vindo a adaptar. Consequentemente, este trabalho contribui para a nossa compreensão da inovação digital e da transformação digital no seio de indústrias altamente institucionais, bem como a interação entre o sistema de planeamento de recursos empresariais e o sistema de controlo de gestão, levando a uma melhoria do desempenho da empresa